Paul Banks Quotes
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If time is my vessel, then learning to love might be my way back to sea
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When I say I had a cosmic confidence that we were capable of writing good music, I'm speaking about that time when we met Sam Fogarino. Greg ex-drummer is actually a really great drummer and a great guy. I never want to sound like I am belittling his contributions in the early days, but when Sam joined, there was an immediacy of, like, "Here we go."
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I perceive everything to be constantly subjective and strange. My version of truth in what I express, it feels like that opaque quality that you're talking about. It's just me being legitimate.
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It's not like changing one word with my lyrics is going to make them more intelligible or relatable. I was always very misunderstood and taken as very pretentious and serious all the time. I would think, "Do you not see there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek and humor here?"
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I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it.
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If you're playing a one-minute game, I could squeeze in five to six games before anybody walked by my cubicle. So I got really good at blitz, one-minute chess games. But that's kind of like the cheap chess version.
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Everyone is broken-hearted except for the drastically unimaginative
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My influences are vast and varied. I was into classic rock at the same time that I was into hip-hop. It was just that hip-hop was the first music that I got really really into. Rock was right on its tail.
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I don't really get a lot of clarity in my everyday life and my interactions with people. Most things that happen to me aren't very straightforward. They're either vastly confusing, or I realize that I'm inventing whatever meaning I'm deriving from whatever happens and it's filtering through my own indulgent perspective.
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If you're an artist, you do what you do, and in a way, you don't even control the core essence of what you do. You try to mold it and develop a style, but the core elements of what you do are just part of who you are.
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In an artistic and spiritual sense I'm really not that concerned about what happens after the album is done.
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I never wanted to start a band to sound like Nirvana.
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I had this perverse gravitation towards using a terrible cliché sandwiched in between absurd non-clichés because I thought it gave the cliché a new resonance. It kills me when my lyrics are misquoted, but as long as people are quoting them right, I don't care what anybody has to say about them.
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Basically, every band that makes it has some dude with some sense of business. I don't know if our band would've been so successful were it not for Daniel's Kessler insight into how things really work. Daniel was the one who was diligently saying, "We should make a demo, send it out, play shows but not too many shows, get on shows with touring bands that are coming to New York."
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You can't just imitate and keep coming up with ideas. You have to be tapping into something that's pure and unconscious in yourself or you'll have no career.
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I would have issues with directions songs were taking, but I never heard one of Carlos' Dangler basslines and said, "I don't like that, do something else." The same goes for the beat and the guitars. I think that's why we were able to make four albums together.
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...It's an unmeetable level of writing. But even if it's something I feel like I can't ever attain, it doesn't crush my spirit. I figured out early on that you gotta find your own strengths and hone them rather than trying to emulate something that impresses you.
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Jeffrey Lewis sings as though absurdity were truth, and truth absurdity. And I think I agree with him.
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Sometimes you learn about the personality of your favorite artist, and you like their art a little less, because it doesn't jibe with what you had envisioned.
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The Christian soldier must avoid two evils - he must not faint or yield in the time of fight, and after a victory he must not wax insolent and secure. When he has overcome, he is so to behave himself as though he were presently again to be assaulted. For Satan’s temptations like the waves of the sea, do follow one in the neck of the other
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I got the chess bug when I was finishing high school, we were doing chess tournaments at my house. I never got to a very high level.
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The Lord does not measure out our afflictions according to our faults, but according to our strength, and looks not what we have deserved, but what we are able to bear.
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That's for non-musicians to say: "I only listen to this or that type of music." I think musicians love all music, or at least that's my case.